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Senator Graham Shouts “Play Ball”

[Excerpt] It should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to the politics of climate legislation to hear Senator Lindsey Graham pronounce, “the cap-and-trade bills in the House and Senate are dead.” The truth is that they’ve been dead for quite some time. It’s just that now we finally have the coroner’s official report.

Many proponents and opponents of climate legislation have had one thing in common for some time now—they hate the American Clean Energy and Security Act (the Waxman-Markey bill which passed in the House by a narrow margin back in June).

So an unlikely assembly of hardcore climate activists and equally hardcore climate deniers likely greeted Graham’s announcement with some measure of satisfaction.

The opponents’ argument against the bill is stunningly simple: They don’t believe in human-caused climate change.

The arguments on the other side are, not surprisingly, more numerous and more complex, not to mention more valid. The reason why so many climate activists like myself have opposed ACES is that the 1,400-page House bill was riddled with so many giveaways to polluters, and set targets so low and so slow, that folks were honestly debating whether or not it would be better to have no legislation at all than this piece of… paper.

Keep in mind: with a much narrower majority in the Senate, the bill was likely going to get watered down even further.